The Pitt/CMU Joint Database Seminar series continues on Monday, November 24 at CMU with a talk given by UC Berkeley's Professor Joe Hellerstein. Professor Hellerstein will give his talk, "Declarative, Data-Centric Approaches to Parallelism", at 4:30pm on CMU's campus, Newell Simon Hall 3305.

Declarative, Data-Centric Approaches to Parallelism

Abstract: Declarative languages allow programmers to say "what" they want, without worrying over the details of "how" to achieve it. These kinds of languages revolutionized data management decades ago (SQL, spreadsheets), but have had limited success in other aspects of computing. The story seems to be changing in recent years, however, via a renaissance of dataflow and logic languages. One new chapter is work that my colleagues and I have been pursuing on Declarative Networking. The results of our first phase of research have been exciting: we have built complex distributed algorithms in 100x less code than traditional implementations, and our programs often match very closely (sometimes line-for-line) with psuedocode published by protocol inventors. This includes ongoing work -- joint with CMU -- on declarative implementations of distributed Machine Learning algorithms.

This talk will review our work on Declarative Networking, and look forward the next chapter: our plans to address parallel programming. We are in the early stages of designing a new data-centric parallel programming language called Lincoln, which will be targeted first at programming cloud computing infrastructure. The ideas behind Lincoln are being stressed and showcased in a project called BOOM, which is performing a declarative "brain transplant" on the open-source Hadoop suite of Google-clone infrastructure .

Bio: Joseph M. Hellerstein is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, whose research focuses on data management and distributed computing. His work has been recognized via awards including wo ACM-SIGMOD "Test of Time" awards, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and MIT Technology Review's inaugural TR100 list. Key ideas from his research have been incorporated into commercial and open-source database software released by IBM, Oracle, and PostgreSQL. He has also held industrial posts including Director of Intel Research Berkeley, and Chief Scientist of Cohera Corporation.